That's the problem. In order for innovation to occur, it will inevitably run afoul of copyright law at some point. Even if the engineers have every intent to stay within the law, copyright law is so badly written and does not work with reality, that the engineers will have to violate it in order to create the next big thing, the next great invention.

what you are describing is a kind of corollary to the innovator's dilemma, known to some as the pirate's dilemma. new technologies are illegal until the copyright powers that be cut some sort of blanket licensing deal. the phonograph was a violation of copyright until a licensing deal created a new industry. radio, cable TV, and the VCR all did too, until licensing deals created their respective industries.

And yet pretty much all the most wanted music software products appear on all the piracy stress for illegal/free download.

people who don't want to buy your product are not your customers, it's just that simple.

if you are spending time and money on people who aren't your customers, you are wasting your time and money. it's just that simple.

the issue with IP enforcement is that in a lot of cases it hurts your legitimate customers AND still does nothing to stop piracy. this is especially true with software. if your copy-protection scheme is implemented badly enough, it will actually turn some -possibly a lot- of your customers away from purchasing your goods and encourage them to pirate them. this is the single worst problem facing the producers of digital goods. this is also the exact problem that good relationships with customers will solve.

it's not about stopping pirates and converting them to paying customers. it's about stopping the exodus of paying customers to unauthorized versions. being good to your paying customers will not stop piracy because piracy cannot be stopped. let me say that again in case i wasn't clear: piracy cannot be stopped. what good relationships will do is stop pissing off your customers and give them a reason to not be pirates.

It would be easy to write a program that made minor modifications to file bits and titles and kept uploading files via Tor. Before long the poisoned files would vastly outnumber the real ones. It would take pirates many manual hours to identify the poisoned files and take them down.

it's been tried before, a couple of years ago, and it didn't work. they were fake torrents uploaded by no-name accounts. even though they had thousands of seeds, the comments were jammed by warnings that they were fakes. within a day or two the bad torrents just fell off the vine.

release groups have reputations to maintain and they take it very seriously.

nothing would make me happier than to have an affordable offsite place to stash all my warez. i have well over a decade's worth of media and even though i can just download it all over again, my collection represents a tremendous investment of time.

i can route around privacy and reliability concerns with block crypto for the sensitive stuff, and local copies for backup purposes.

i would love to have a copy of my NAS servers out there in the ether, off site, even if it was uber slow and really only meant it was useful for backups and not streaming.

the simple fact is that i have around 8TB of data, so even transfer in and out was free, at $0.05 per gig for storage, an online file locker would cost me $400 a month.

I'm hoping this succeeds. If it does, then a new internet will be born, over international waters, where no country's laws will work anymore.

there is a high probability that this is a joke. the acronym for Low Orbiting Server Station is conspicuously similar to the Low Orbiting Ion Canon of Anonymous fame. also, april first is in a couple of weeks.

TPB has done this before. in 2008 they started a rumor that they moved to egypt.

Because with wireless, you can easily intercept the communications stream with nothing more than a cheap smartphone.

yes, but the goal of the project is to produce encrypted speech tools for use in a political environment where the oppressive regime has complete control over the network infrastructure. tapping a network is really easy when the network provider is complicit, just ask any law enforcement agency in the united states.

wired or wireless, the security of the tool is at the application level and not the network layer.

Even if AT&T is the biggest dog in the yard, shouldn't we be focused on increasing their competition instead of regulating them?

*IF* AT&T's shareholders were to vote for net neutrality, *AND* AT&T were to tout its net neutrality as a value proposition for its customers, it could force other service providers to do the same in order to remain competitive.

it's easier to pay bills (and turn profits) when the numbers are smaller. maybe hollywood could stop spending so much on production and create a product that works with the current itunes/netflix/amazon revenue model?

naw. better push for a reduction in civil liberties. that makes *way* more sense.